and he had just turned the corner of his career, the Lord Chamberlain sent a stirring message to the theatre in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare was at work as playwright and actor. The young dramatist was ordered to present himself at Court for two days following Christmas, and to give his sovereign on each of the two evenings a taste of his quality.

Shakespeare at Court.

The invitation was of singular interest. It cannot have been Shakespeare's promise as an actor that led to the royal summons. His histrionic fame did not progress at the same rate as his literary repute. He was never to win the laurels of a great actor. His most conspicuous triumph on the stage was achieved in middle life as the Ghost in his own Hamlet, and he ordinarily confined his efforts to old men of secondary rank. Ample compensation for his personal deficiencies as an actor was provided by the merits of his companions on his first visit to Court; he was to come supported by actors of the highest eminence in their generation. Directions were given that the greatest of the tragic actors of the day, Richard Burbage, and the greatest of the comic actors, William Kemp, were to bear the young actor-dramatist company. With neither of these was Shakespeare's histrionic position then, or at any time, comparable. For years they were the leaders of the acting profession. Shakespeare's relations with Burbage and Kemp were close, both privately and professionally. Almost all Shakespeare's great tragic characters were created on the stage by Burbage, who had lately roused London to enthusiasm by his stirring representation of Shakespeare's Richard III. for the first time. As long as Kemp lived he conferred a like service on many of Shakespeare's comic characters, and he had recently proved his worth as a Shakespearian comedian by his original rendering of the part of Peter, the Nurse's graceless serving-man, in Romeo and Juliet. Thus power

fully supported, Shakespeare appeared for the first time in the royal presence-chamber in Greenwich Palace on the evening of St. Stephen's Day (the Boxing-day of subsequent generations) in 1594.

A perform

ance at Court in

Extant documentary evidence of this visit of Shakespeare to Court may be seen in the manuscript account of the 'Treasurer of the [royal] chamber' now in the Public Record Office in London. The document attests that Shakespeare and his two associates 1594. performed one 'Comedy or Interlude' on that night of Boxing-day in 1594, and gave another 'Comedy or Interlude' on the next night but one (on Innocents'-day); that the Lord Chamberlain paid the three men for their services the sum of £13, 6s. 8d., and that the Queen added to the honorarium, as a personal proof of her satisfaction, the further sum of £6, 13s. 4d. The remuneration was thus £20 in all. These were substantial sums in those days, when the purchasing power of money was eight times as much as it is to-day, and the three actors' reward would now be equivalent to £160. Unhappily the record does not go beyond the payment of the money. What words of commendation or encouragement Shakespeare received from his royal auditor are not handed down to us, nor do we know for certain what plays were performed on the great occasion. It is reasonable to infer that all the scenes came from Shakespeare's repertory. Probably they were drawn from Love's Labour's Lost, which was always popular in later years at Elizabeth's Court, and from The Comedy of Errors, in which the farcical confusions and horse-play were calculated to gratify the Queen's robust taste. But nothing can be stated with absolute certainty except that on December 29, 1594, Shakespeare travelled up the River Thames from Greenwich to London with a heavier purse and a lighter heart than on his setting out. That the

visit had in all ways been crowned with success there is ample indirect evidence. He and his work had fascinated his sovereign, and many a time was she to seek delight again in the renderings of his plays, by himself and his fellow actors, at her palaces on the banks of the Thames during her remaining nine years of life.

When, a few months later, Shakespeare was penning his new play of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he could not forbear to make a passing obeisance of gallantry (in that vein for which the old spinster queen was always thirsting) to a fair vestal throned by the West,' who passed her life 'in maiden meditation, fancy free.'

Shakespeare's gallantry.

The interest that Shakespeare's work excited at the Court was continuous throughout his life, and helped to render his Continuposition unassailable. When James I. ascended ance of Court the throne, no author was more frequently honfavour. oured by command' performances of his plays in the presence of the sovereign. Then, as now, the playgoer's appreciation was quickened by his knowledge that the play he was witnessing had been produced before the Court at Greenwich or Whitehall a few days earlier. Shakespeare's publishers were not above advertising facts like these, as the Publisher's title-pages of quarto editions published in his lifetime sufficiently prove. 'The pleasant conceited comedy called Love's Labour's Lost' was advertised with the appended words, as it was presented before her highness this last Christmas.' 'A most pleasant and excellent conceited comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor' was stated to have been divers times acted both before her Majesty and elsewhere.' ineffably great play of King Lear was advertised with something like tradesmanlike effrontery as it was played before

advertisements of the fact.

the King's Majesty at Whitehall on St. Stephen's Night in the Christmas Holidays.'

But the Court never stood alone in its admiration of Shakespeare's work. Court and crowd never differed in their estimation of his dramatic power. There is no

The favour

crowd.

doubt that Shakespeare conspicuously caught the of the ear of the Elizabethan playgoers of all classes at a very early date in his career, and held it firmly for life. 'These plays,' wrote two of his professional associates of the reception of the whole series in the playhouse during his lifetime, these plays have had their trial already, and stood out all appeals.' Equally significant is Ben Jonson's apostrophe of Shakespeare as

"The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage.'

Popular fallacy of Shake

neglect.

A charge has sometimes been brought against the Elizabethan playgoer of failing to recognise Shakespeare's sovereign genius. That accusation should be reckoned among popular fallacies. It was not merely the recognition of the fashionable, the critical, speare's the highly-educated, that Shakespeare personally received. It was by the voice of the half-educated populace, whose heart and intellect were for once in the right, that he was acclaimed the greatest interpreter of human nature that literature had known, and, as subsequent experience has proved, was likely to know. There is evidence that throughout his lifetime and for a generation afterwards his plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and gallery alike. It is true that he was one of a number of popular dramatists, many of whom had rare gifts, and all of whom glowed with a spark of the genuine literary fire. But Shakespeare was the sun in the

firmament; when his light shone the fires of all contemporaries paled in the contemporary playgoer's eye. Very forcible and very humorous was the portrayal of human frailty and eccentricity in the plays of Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson, too, was a fine classical scholar, which Shakespeare, despite his general knowledge of Latin, was not. But when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both tried their hands at dramatising episodes in Roman history, the Elizabethan public of all degrees of intelligence welcomed Shakespeare's efforts with an enthusiasm which they rigidly withheld from Ben Jonson's. This is how an ordinary playgoer contrasted in crude verse the reception of Jonson's Roman play of Catiline's Conspiracy with that of Shakespeare's Roman play of Julius Caesar:

'So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius-oh! how the audience

Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.'

Jonson's 'tedious though well-laboured Catiline' was unendurable when compared with the ravishing interest of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare was the popular favourite. It is rare that the artist who is a hero with the multitude is also a hero with the cultivated few. But Shakespeare's universality of appeal was such as to include among his worshippers from first to last the trained and the untrained playgoer of his time.

Shakespeare's universality of appeal.

VI

Shakespeare's work was exceptionally progressive in quality; few authors advanced in their art more steadily. His hand grew firmer, his thought grew richer, as his years